Appearing on America's favorite quiz show—the show so staid and reliable that John Oliver quipped at last year's Emmys that it might just be the most permanent fixture on earth—can make female contestants feel that they are running a sexualized gauntlet of unwelcome tweets, emails, and Facebook messages replete with explicit sexual material. I know, because I was one of them.When I taped the show in August, I knew I'd bombed and tried to salvage it with a joke. I wasn't prepared for that joke—a reference to "Turd Ferguson" from the old Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy! Sketches—to go viral when the show aired in September. Twitter chatter during the game led to an article on Uproxx, then more and more elsewhere, and a YouTube video whose views ballooned into the millions in the following days. The experience of going viral is brief but intense. It had the peculiar urgency of a dream—especially when I started reading the comments.On Twitter, users told Lynsey she was 'giving the buzzer a handjob' and that she looked 'like someone you'd see in a MILF porn.'
Scrolling through the thousand or so comments on the (since-deleted) YouTube video, I felt my skin start to crawl. My joke on a quiz show had somehow devolved into a group discussion of my breasts.Read More: How Women Artists Deal with Online Abuse
It was a discordant, but consistent, note in the strange crescendo of those few heady days, before a video of a rat dragging a pizza slice supplanted me as the next viral sensation. On the one hand, it was thrilling to be the object of so much desire, but on the other hand, it was disconcertingly aggressive. I felt unbalanced—not quite at home in my suddenly much-discussed body. I felt claustrophobic in my own flesh: Each positive headline about me gave rise to waves of anxiety, as I considered what I knew the comments would contain. I was suddenly in the spotlight, and though I had worn my sister's fancy navy-blue dress on game day, I felt naked—found too wanted, and wanting—against the anonymous torrent of words.One commentariat, as a whole, determined I was bangable, but only doggy ('Great meat cannons on that land beast').
Liz Fritz, a 27-year-old contestant Twitter dubbed "the Jeopardy! Porn Star," told me she'd "dieted, trained for a 10K race, and made sure [her] hair and nails were on point" before her appearance—the one thing she felt she could control. "But I had no idea just how intense the response would be. There were thousands and thousands of tweets to me and about me. Most were about my breasts, and I believe they were intended to be compliments," she said.There were thousands and thousands of tweets to me and about me. Most were about my breasts.
While most male contestants in my informal survey hadn't received aggressive sexual commentary, they weren't exempt from Twitter bullying: male contestants were told they seemed autistic or like school shooters. Arthur Chu, one of the most successful contestants in Jeopardy's history, said people wrote that he was a virgin who would spend his winnings on prostitutes.The scum of the internet are just not threatened by another dude getting attention, generally speaking.
Other women—like Amanda Hess, Anita Sarkeesian, and Congresswoman Katherine Clark—have spoken out about the ways women can be the subjects of disproportionate and gendered harassment online. None of the women I spoke to, myself included, had expected their spot in a family-friendly, early-evening trivia show to earn them a toxic mixture of sexualized opprobrium.And yet, as I set out to better understand my own experience, and those of other women who had sought out America's most famous trivia gauntlet, I was heartened by the one thing I did not find: regret. Not one of the women I spoke with regretted their decision to appear on Jeopardy!, fulfilling childhood dreams in some cases, paying off student debt in others. Despite the chagrin-inducing—and sometimes downright unsettling—responses we received, each of us had reveled in the change to engage in intellectual competition, to shake Alex Trebek's hand, and, in my case, to strike a blow for doofuses everywhere."Those men don't own me. I own me and determine how I behave and how I present myself," said Tiombi Prince. "I refuse to have my accomplishments diminished."Those men don't own me. I own me and determine how I behave and how I present myself